What was still worse, she might be amused! He could not get it out of
his head that there was something dangerously, almost ludicrously,
conventional in the whole position; it seemed to suggest some foolish,
old-fashioned, sentimental picture. The solitary dell, and the two
figures; why, he felt as if blue ribbons were beginning to sprout at his
knees; and he feared to turn to his companion lest he should find her
with a crook and a kirtle. He did not ask himself why wretched
reminiscences of theatrical tradition should thrust themselves upon him
here in the lonely wilds of Ross-shire; what he dreaded was that some
such idea might occur to her and provoke her resentment--what was still
more ghastly, it might make her laugh!
Honnor Cunyngham, for her part, was quietly and contentedly munching her
sandwiches of salmon and vinegared lettuce-leaf; and no such idle
town-fancies were troubling her. Probably she was thinking that the hot
sunlight after the shower made everything intensely vivid--the
silver-stemmed birches in this picturesque little dell rising gracefully
into the keen blue of the sky; the diamond-starred bracken and grass
shining after the wet; the clear, tea-brown water at her feet glancing
in the sun; the green and bronze stones and pebbles showing clear at the
bottom of the pellucid brook as it chased and danced on its way down to
the Geinig.
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